Hi, the following patch is a proof-of-concept implementation of external format guessing for incoming messages (and customizable external formats for outgoing messages, defaulting conservatively to latin-1). With that patch, cl-irc now opens a binary stream to the server, and opens flexi-streams on top of that. The outgoing part is pretty straightforward; the incoming part not so much (: Reading works like this: * We read a line of latin-1 chars * We try to decode their code-chars (latin1 is a 1:1 translation to code-chars, and where it isn't, I hope flexistreams takes care of that (-:) using the list of external-formats in *default-incoming-external-formats*. * When we find a decoding that doesn't throw a error, we build a message from that. Positive side effect: cl-irc should now work on windows because the external format allows specification of eol convention. Negative side effect: I didn't get parsing to work without #\Return, so this patch appends a #\Return character to the raw message. Which brings me to the todo list: * DCC connections probably don't work. I don't care about dcc, so I won't fix them (: * The parser should work without #\Return. * reading latin1 and decoding from the char codes is ... ugly. But it's probably less ugly than doing our own buffering. Maybe somebody wants to investigate that. (: Here's the patch: Cheers, -- Andreas Fuchs, (http://|im:asf@|mailto:asf@)boinkor.net, antifuchs